Microsoft’s newest frontier may just be your household budgeting process.
Microsoft is pushing deeper into personal finance, having just announced the launch in the United States of its new Money in Excel product.
The new Excel offering enables Microsoft 365 Personal and Microsoft 365 Family users to plug all their financial information into one place and display it all on spreadsheets and charts.
The new system will also continually update the user’s finances, checking the latest balances in bank, loan, investment and credit card accounts.
No laborious stint of data entry is needed to get started — once Money in Excel is installed and connected up to a user’s accounts, financial data will all be streamed into new program, said Arjun Tomar, product marketing manager for Microsoft 365, in the company’s product release announcement.
“You no longer need to spend hours manually setting up a personal finance spreadsheet from scratch; Money in Excel does it for you in just a few seconds,” Tomar said. “And every time you want to update the workbook with the latest transactions, just click the Update button and get the latest snapshot of your transactions and accounts without ever leaving Excel.”
In order to get set up, users have to download Money in Excel, while also giving permission for a “third-party plugin” from Microsoft’s technical partner on the new product, Plaid, the San Francisco-based company that provides a data-transfer network for FinTech and other financial products.
Through Money in Excel, users can break down and analyze their personal finances and spending with help from various charts and other graphics, with month-over month comparisons, according to Microsoft.
The new Microsoft personal finance tracker will also send out alerts when changes “are detected in your subscription fees, changes in bank and overdraft charges, or any big purchases that were posted during the month,” Microsoft’s Tomar notes.
The new product is the result of Microsoft and Plaid teaming up in March. As reported by PYMNTS, the two were partnering on the now-released Money in Excel.